


lonely hearts.

by outpastthemoat



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Castiel reading books, Fallen Castiel, Fluff, Human Castiel, M/M, Paperbacks, angsty fluff, romance novels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-14
Updated: 2013-08-14
Packaged: 2017-12-23 11:31:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/925883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/outpastthemoat/pseuds/outpastthemoat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He thinks he might give up having his own anything just to be able to step foot inside the room next door and sit on the edge of Dean’s bed instead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	lonely hearts.

He sits on the edge of the motel bed and peers round at the room.  It’s his, for tonight, and that’s what he never can quite seem to understand.  It’s his, for now, but yesterday it was someone else’s, and tomorrow it will someone else’s again.

He hears, emanating through the thin papered walls, the sound of the television: the History Channel program Sam keeps watching at every motel they stop at, just because it’s always playing.  He hears the shower running next door.  The water shuts off and he hears the low tones of Dean’s voice, talking to Sam.  

He has his own bathroom, he tells himself.  All his own.  Dean always seems to think he wants or requires things of his own.  Castiel’s own duffle bag, khaki-colored; Castiel’s own bathroom, with cracked porcelain tiles and stained grout.  Castiel’s own bed, or rather beds; he can chose to sleep on either of the two doubles in his own room. Castiel’s own television, upon which he can watch anything he wants.

He turns on the History Channel, and that makes him feel almost like he’s in Dean’s and Sam’s room, right there beside them.

He hears Dean’s voice, and Sam’s response, and he thinks he might give up having his own anything just to be able to step foot inside the room next door and sit on the edge of Dean’s bed instead.

But Dean has made it clear that that’s not an option.  He’s supposed to stay here, and so far he has.  He sits on the bed and watches infomercials late into the night, just like he's done every night for the past two months, until he accidentally sits on the remote and changes the channel to to Bob Ross’s watercolor landscapes.  He falls asleep on the bed halfway through the program without bothering to pull down the comforter and sheets, and without bothering to take off his boots or jeans.

Dean might fuss at him for that, on the rare occasions when Dean enters Castiel’s room in the mornings.  Usually Dean simply knocks, rapid-fire like an artillery of bullets, pounding on the door and waking Castiel up with the alarming sensation of imminent battle.  Meaning, he wakes up with his heart hammering in his throat and gasping for air. 

Dean doesn’t usually stay long, but occasionally he’ll provide pertinent information to the events of their day, like when to be packed and ready to check out or to pausing to ask where Castiel would like to eat for breakfast.  Even more rarely, Dean will burst through his doors, asking to use Castiel’s bathroom.  On these occasions, he will use all the clean towels and leave the bath mat sopping wet on the floor and beard hairs in the sink, and Castiel will not have time for anything other than washing his face and brushing his teeth before checking out.  Usually this happens when Dean is in the midst of an argument with Sam.

It’s nice, afterward.  Dean will come out of the bathroom, buttoning up his shirt, and he’ll sit down on Castiel’s rumpled bed to put on his boots, and he’ll shout cheerfully at Castiel through the bathroom door while Castiel brushes his teeth slowly. He’ll go back inside the bathroom and push Castiel away from the sink so he can wash his hands, and when it’s time to leave, he’ll wait at the door for Castiel to pick up his duffle bag, and they’ll walk together down the hall, bumping against each other’s shoulders and knocking their bags together.

But most of the time, Castiel has a room to himself.  

The noise from the room next door cuts off abruptly, and suddenly the History Channels are no longer playing in unison. Someone pounds on the wall.  

"Turn off the goddamned television, Cas," Dean’s voice says faintly, hollowed out and echoing through the cracking plastered walls.  "We’re going to bed."  

He switches off his television.  Silence floods his room.  “Night, Cas” Dean’s voice says through the walls.

"Goodnight, Dean," he answers.  He sets the remote on the nightstand and wonders darkly how Dean expects him to entertain himself without television.  Finally he gets up and pokes around his room.  There isn’t much to see.  He’s already seen the beds, and the miniature refrigerator and the battered oak desk, and the faded, crooked pictures of freshwater fish on the walls.

There’s a shelf by the desk with a row of sad, battered paperbacks and one hardcover Reader’s Digest from 1987, all abandoned by previous occupants; all with covers, baring the Digest, that look the same.  He rifles through the paperbacks curious, and spreads them out on the bed.

Most of the books seem to be by the same author.  Most of the books are proud to acknowledge this fact, since the lettering on the cover that lists the author’s name is of far greater size and of a more spectacular color than what Castiel supposes is that actual title.

The cover illustrations are alluring.  The titles are intriguing.  He sorts through the books slowly and mulls over them.  He holds in his hands  _Genuine Lies, Honest Illusions, Lonely Hearts, Loyalty in Death, Can’t Say Goodbye, Man of Mine_ , and  _With This Kiss_.  

 _Tempted by her boss_ , one blurb reads.  “No, thank you,” Castiel tells the book. He picks another one out of the pile and ends up with  _Lonely Hearts_ , whose title is outlined with gold and filled in with a violet shade of pink.  He turns it around and reads the back flap.   _Joseph St. Andrews has returned home from the front lines of War War II to bury his wife, when he meets Diana Lamonte, the proud and lovely nurse fiercely loyal to the memory of her deceased fiance. Together they harbor a secret that could destroy their love before it even begins…_

The pages are yellowed, and some of their edges have been folded down. The book falls open to the middle pages automatically, and he scans the pages, but the events are confusing.  He can’t tell if he’ll like the book or not.  He’s not quite sure what he does like in a book.  But he flips back to the start anyway and reads the first few pages.  And then he just keeps going.

He has to put the book down somewhere around page 113.  He doesn’t understand why it always feels so much more uncomfortable reading about sexual intercourse that it does merely watching it, like he’s always done before.  Maybe because of the way the characters think.  Before, watching sex was nothing personal.  But Diana’s thoughts about Joseph are uncomfortably intimate. She doesn’t like him, or so she’s been saying.  But she worries over him, thinks of him, misses him, and now she’s kissing his cheeks and all over his face, so thankful that he’s alive and safe in her arms, and Castiel doesn’t understand. 

He’s beginning to think this isn’t the kind of book he’s supposed to be reading. These sort of secrets weren’t meant for him to unlock.  Love is a complex human emotion.  He’s not sure understanding its intricacies was ever in his power.

But he picks the book back up, at two o’clock in the morning and finding himself still unable to sleep, and he reads through the night.

—

He’s still reading when Dean pounds on his door the next morning.  He reads through Dean’s shower, through Dean brushing his teeth, and through Dean buttoning his shirt.  He might have missed Dean putting on his boots, too, but Dean sits down beside him on the bed and takes the book out of his hands. 

"I was reading that," Castiel says.  He’d almost reached the end, even.  Diana was saying something about Joseph finally coming home for good.  But it’s not quite annoyance he feels right now.  More resignation.  Dean brings out this emotion in him frequently.  

"What  _is_  this?” Dean asks curiously.  His shoulder is brushing up against Castiel’s.  Dean turns the book right-side up and raises his eyebrows.

"Pretty racy stuff, Cas," he says, smirking, and Castiel glares.  He knows Dean in all his moods.  Dean thinks this is hilarious.  This is going to be another one of those things Dean will hold over his head and bring up in the moments just when Castiel’s feeling almost fond of him, like the time Castiel had made popcorn with the bag wrong-side-up, or the time Castiel had been forced to wear Sam’s shirt, one with shirttails that hung almost to midthigh.  

"I like it," Castiel says, and Dean looks at him oddly.  Dean always looks at him like that, whenever he says something and really means it. 

"This is just crap, Cas," Dean says.  He doesn’t say it forcefully.  Just a simple observation.  "It’s for swooning chicks who get off on some airbrushed idea of romance. Why waste your time reading this junk? It’s not any good." **  
**

He hands Castiel the book back. Castiel runs his finger down the crease in the spine. He stares down at the book. “I don’t think it’s crap,” Castiel says.

Dean just shrugs.  “You can read what you want, I guess,” he mutters. “I just don’t know why you’d bother with this garbage.”  He gets off the bed and grabs his boots.  He doesn’t wait for Castiel at the door.  He disappears down the hall to his room with Sam.

"You don’t mean that," Castiel says, but he suspects Dean does.

Castiel hears the echo of those words long after Dean’s left.  He doesn't finish reading the ending of the book.  Instead he tosses  _Lonely Hearts_  in the trashcan while he’s packing his duffle bag and preparing to leave.

But halfway down the hall to the lobby, he turns around and he returns to the room, repentant, and digs through the trashcan.  He doesn't like the thought of the book being thrown out, even if Dean does think it's garbage.  He buries the paperback deep inside his duffle bag.

It shouldn’t matter so much, what Dean thinks of him.  Or, since it doesn’t seem to be the case that Castiel will ever stop caring about what Dean thinks of him, he supposes that if he keeps the paperback hidden inside his duffle bag, far away from Dean, that Dean will forget about the incident entirely.  

—

Castiel carries paperbacks around with him, all over the bunker and in the car and on hunts.  He picks them out of trashcans, navigates to them unquestioningly at thrift stores and at the magazine aisle in grocery stores, picks them up at gas stations and library books sales.

“Jesus, Cas,” Dean says blankly when Castiel unloads an armful of paperbacks at the register, feeling pleased with himself and his selection.  There had been lots of paperbacks to choose from, many he'd never read before.  “How many of those books do you  _need_ , anyway?”

Castiel feels himself deflate rather. Dean has a way of causing this to happen.  “Oh,” he says carefully, “I don't need them.  Not really.  I just like having something to read.”

He’s not sure why he suddenly feels like all his limbs have abruptly acquired an extra measure of gravity, but all at once it’s hard to stack the paperbacks up on the counter.  He wishes there were some way for him to disappear.  Or his books.  Or Dean; any of those things would be preferable to standing here with Dean giving him the same slightly incredulous look he’s been shooting Castiel since he first picked up  _Lonely Hearts_ _._

He’s decided he likes the books, the best thing about them being the way they end.  Predicable.  Everything going according to plan.  Every one of the books ends with a kiss, or a wedding, or two people gently holding hands and smiling at one another.  He likes these books the best.  It would be nice to be able to predict the future again, he thinks.  It would be nice to be one of the people in these books.  At the beginning, they haven’t got anything to look forward to except happiness, and they don’t even know it.  They take it for granted, he thinks sometimes, simply expecting things to work out the way they’ve planned.  A long comfortable life with love, a home, a family.  And the strangest thing is that their plans don’t fall through.  In the end, they always wind up with the person they love, no matter how badly things go in the middle.

They capture his imagination, those endings.  Imagination is, according to Dean, one of the perks of humanity.  Castiel has spent the majority of his uninterrupted moments doing his best to cultivate imagination.  He likes to imagine how the characters go on even after books are over.  Growing up, growing old, all with another person, warm and comfortable and always close at hand.  He’s seen this happen for thousands of years, but he thinks he must not have paid much attention, because he’d never really understood the value of such a connection before.  

He says this to Dean one morning at breakfast, who takes it badly.  Dean snaps, “I’d rather know from the start what I was getting into.  None of those happily-ever-after stories ever happen in the real world. Books like that, they’re not real, Cas. Just make-believe.”

“I know that,” Castiel says, feeling a great annoyance with Dean.  Dean doesn’t understand what he’s trying to say.  This, at least, is nothing new, but he’s trying to make a point to Dean, and failing, and it hurts him somewhat because Dean doesn’t seem want to listen.

What he’d like to explain to Dean is that he likes seeing how relationships grow.  He likes watching two people meet, not knowing that they would ever be significant to each other, and maybe even hating each other a little, but then getting around to finally talking everything out and clearing up their misunderstanding or running from vengeful mob bosses in mortal peril and suddenly realizing just how important they are to one another.

He reads the paperbacks in his room in the bunker at night.  He leaves a stack of them on his nightstand, but gradually he loses them, one by one.  Some of them end up in the library, or the war room, or on any of the tables in those rooms.  Some of them he loses as pages fall out.

Dean slips into his room one night.  He doesn’t stay long.  He holds out a leaf of yellowed pages, and Castiel accepts them.  “Picked these up all over the library,” Dean says.  “Quit making a mess, Cas.  Pick up your damn books.  They’re all over the place.”

The pages belong to the last chapter of  _The Heart at the End of the Lane_ , which Castiel had thoroughly enjoyed.  He likes the books where there’s a place at the end for one of the lovers to come home to, and someone waiting up for them, late into the night.  He likes the books that end with two people crossing a threshold together. 

He touches the edges of the pages with his fingertips after Dean leaves his room.  It seems a shame to throw them out, even if the pages will not longer fit in the book.  The endings are really the best part, he thinks again, and finally he stacks the fallen-out pages on top of his nightstand. 

There are certain things Castiel doesn’t dare to imagine. Mostly to do with Dean.  Things like leaving, and then running into Dean years later, like in  _Borrowed Time_.  Years from now, Dean might recognize him on the street, and call out his name.  Years from now, Dean might still be glad to see him.

The next day he goes around the bunker, picking up the books off of armchairs and couches and tables, and stacks them by his bed in his room.

—

He packs each item carefully.  He knows how; he’s watched Dean. Fold the jeans, tuck the rolls of socks into side pockets in his duffle.  Stick the toothbrush in a plastic bag, make sure the toothpaste cap is screwed on tightly.  Roll up his shirts to save room.  Wear his coat out the door, for the same reason.  

There’s a place for everything in the duffle bag, he muses: a pocket for a wallet, a pouch for the toothbrush and the comb Dean swears he never should have purchased since he’ll never use it anyway. 

He packs the paperbacks last.  There isn’t quite enough room, even though his clothes aren’t many and don’t take up much space.  He can’t take them all, so he pulls of several of the paperbacks and leaves them on the nightstand, next to the torn-out pages of  _The Heart at  the End of the Lane_. Dean might want to throw them out.  Dean will probably want to throw them out.  He almost takes the extra books anyway, even though he’ll have to leave behind three shirts in order to make room in the bag, but it doesn’t seem worth it.  Dean can do as he pleases.  Castiel can’t mind too much.  

Dean’s waiting at the door.  He won’t look Cas in the face, but he hands him a book.  “For the road,” is all he says.  “For you to read.”  

The book is  _Lonely Hearts._ He’s already read it before, or most of it anyway, but Dean must not remember.  He feels strangely touched in spite of that.  

“Thank you,” he says finally.  Dean watches him leave with folded arms.  _Just_   _go_ , he’d said last night, which was more or less exactly what Castiel had expected to hear, before grabbing ahold of his shoulders and holding him fiercely for one brief moment.  But he’d imagined, without really hoping it would happen, that Dean would have said something else instead.

He carries the book in his hands out the door, and around the bus station, and onto the bus, and it stays in his lap until he’s two states over.  But when he gets up to disembark, a note flutters out to the floor.  He tucks it back inside the book without glancing at it.  

—

He looks for other angels, his brothers and sisters. Most of them do not seem to want to be found, or at least not by him.  He finds angels in grocery stores, in parking lots.  He finds an angel working at a Mexican restaurant who has developed a passion for cooking enchiladas.  He finds an angel with a unnerving hairstyle and sharply barbed and ripped clothing who refuses, rather violently, to leave the mall and her new lifestyle.  He does not look for, but finds anyway, a pack of werewovles who go for his heart.  They are unsuccesful, but leave him battered and bleeding through his shirt.

He picks the motel more or less at random, just because he likes the sound of it.  The name Garden Inn sounds pleasant.  The actual Garden Inn is not.  

The room is musty, and smells of cigarette smoke, and the peeling wallpaper covered with sprigs of ivy is mottled with spots.  Spots of what, Castiel doesn’t know, but he rather likes the wallpaper itself.  The ivy makes him think of the gardens this motel ought to have, but doesn’t.

It’s hot outside, and the first thing Castiel does is take off his coat, carefully pulling the torn fabric away from the gash in his chest.  He lies on the bed, stirring up dust when he rolls on the pillows, and breathes heavily for a while.  The air conditioner doesn’t work right.  It fussily blows hot air into the room, raising the dust and pumping in specks of pollen and fine grains of dirt.  

So this is humanity, Castiel thinks, lying on bed and panting from the heat.  Dying, he's discovering, is already undignified enough, and to be dying without even the minor comfort of air conditioning seems to him to be eminently unfair.  He wishes he’d just been killed straight-out.  A quick end is far more attractive to him right now than his current prospects of bleeding to death slowly in an empty motel room.

He finds he doesn't feel too badly about the gash in his flesh.  What he does care about is getting a glass of water.  He feels like he will die if he doesn’t locate water, never mind the chest wound.  There’s a minuscule refrigerator in one corner of the room, and it contains bottles of water, but when he drags himself over and opens the fridge he finds that nothing inside is actually cold.  So the fridge isn't working, either.  If Castiel didn’t already know better, he would have been inclined to think of this as hell.  But hell is cold, a deep-freeze, and Alabama is not.  

He lies on one double bed and drinks lukewarm water and thinks that if things were the way they are supposed to be, Dean would be the one lying on this bed, and Sam would be asleep across the room, and he would be sitting quietly in a chair, invisible and protective and watching over them both despite Dean’s protests.  

He’s never done what he’d been told.  But he doesn’t know what to do now.  It seems there is nothing left to rebel against.

His bed claims to have Magic Fingers.  Castiel doesn’t know if he believes it.  He’s been in motels like this before, and he’s found that they usually lie.  He stares at the lettering for a while. Finally he picks up his coat and shakes it out a handful of change from one of the pockets.  He inserts two quarters.  The bed shakes alarmingly.  So the motel hadn't lied, after all.  The Magic Fingers does work.  The remote does not. 

He lies on the bed and lets himself be tossed around.  It isn't pleasant.  He feels a bit like he had one time after having seafood for dinner, and had spent the remainder of the night throwing up.  He suspects it's from the blood loss.  The vibrating bed doesn’t help. 

 _Stay put_ , Dean had said.   _I’ll find you.  Don’t move._

There’s no Gideon bible in the nightstand drawer.  Dean had once read it aloud to him, one night, just the two of them, with Sam back at the bunker.  He does find a paperback on the single decorative shelf over the bed.  It’s not one he’s read before, but he doesn’t much feel like reading something new.

His ribs hurt, and the gash through his chest won’t stop bleeding.  He wishes the bed would stop moving, and that the world would stop shaking.

He wonders what Dean would say if he showed him the book.  He imagines sitting on the same bed he’s sitting on, only Dean is there, too.  Dean is watching television, but he turns the volume down when Castiel leans over against his shoulder and reads the back cover’s blurb out loud.  

“That sounds nice, buddy,” he says when Castiel is through.  ”How does it end?”

"I don’t know," Castiel tells him.  

"Thought you said all those books end the same."  Dean leans into his side and stays there.  "Thought that was why you liked ‘em.  Happy endings."

"Not all of them end that way," Castiel replies.  He’d been taken aback at the end of  _Wuthering Heights_.  The intertwined lovers on the cover had mislead him greatly.

But he finds he can’t go on from there.  It’s too much, imagining.  He doesn’t quite have the energy for it. He reaches for duffle instead, and takes out his book instead, the one Dean had given him.  He never had read the end of  _Lonely Hearts_ , he remembers.  Well, he never will now, he supposes.  

He opens  _Lonely Hearts_  at random and then remembers the note.  He’d tucked it in the very back, close to the last page.  The note just says,  _If this was one of your stupid books, Cas, then you wouldn’t fucking mess everything up every time you go._

He thinks about that as he drifts off.

—

When he wakes up, Dean is holding him.  Castiel wishes he wouldn’t.  Though he allows that Dean might not be aware that he is sending mixed messages, it’s not much of a comfort to think that Dean is only holding him because of some misguided, familial instinct to hold him together as he bleeds out on a motel bed.  

Dean’s tucked behind him on the bed, leaning against the headboard.  Dean's wrapped his arms around him, and he's pressing down hard on Castiel's chest, right where it hurts.  

"This is like one of your books," Dean says, almost in his ear.  "How do you like that?"

Castiel doesn’t like it, not at all.  Dean has a way of bringing out a series of dreadful, shamed feelings inside him.  He thinks that if everything didn’t hurt so badly, he’d probably like this very much.  It's a novel experience, being held by Dean.

"You were right. Those books are terrible," he says to Dean.  But all Dean does is lower his head and rest it against Castiel’s shoulder, his nose against Castiel's neck. He doesn’t know quite what to make of it.  He doesn’t know what to do with this sudden tenderness of Dean’s.  ”Just make-believe.”

"Nah," Dean says.  His breath warms the side of Castiel's face. "They’re real enough."

Castiel sits still and tries to process this.  He’s finding it difficult.  ”I thought you hated them,” Castiel says finally.

"Guess I changed my mind," Dean says.  "They’re not that bad. I read a couple, while you were gone."

Everything feels off-focus and distant, even Dean. Castiel tries to summon up enough energy to respond.  He asks rather faintly,  ”Did you enjoy them?”

"No," says Dean.  "I was missing you.  And those books were the only things you’d left behind. You’re a fucking idiot, Cas.  Why’d you want to go?"

Castiel supposes he might be exactly what Dean says he is, but he also finds he’d like to hear Dean say that first part again.  Never mind what Dean thinks of him.  He finds it enough that Dean had been thinking of him.  So Dean had missed him, after all.  He'd imagined it once, Dean saying that.  But this is nothing like he'd imagined.

"I wanted to find a connection," he tells Dean, and Dean just snorts.  "You already  _have_  connections, Cas."

"It’s not the same." He hestiates.  He says slowly, "I never wanted my own room."

He can feel Dean close his eyes.  His eyelashes brush against Castiel's neck.  He feels Dean's chest moving up and down in an unsteady rhythm.  Dean only says, voice tight, "I didn't know."

"It's not your fault," Castiel says.  “I think I was lonely.”

"Human condition, buddy," Dean says in his ear. Dean holds him tighter for a long moment, bringing up one hand and pressing it on the side of Castiel’s head, then Dean roughly kisses his cheek and releases him all together.  "Come on. Let’s go home."


End file.
